Sounds amazing, i heard you could walk around with a usb stick and end up reinstalling your entire system just the way you backed it up using NixOS. Maybe some day i’ll give it a shot, nuke whatever is currently on my old thinkpad (of course) and try this NixOS thing out.
oh wow i had misread your initial statement, yeah i wasn’t arguing for a flatpak/appimage distro only concept like silverblue or anything lmao i just like the possibility of having something that’s distro agnostic
Ideally, it’d be good enough to simply have say, an appimage/flatpak and have the source code and then let distro maintainers/end users build it how they want/need to, i have had the pleasure of trying to get NVENC working in OBS under Debian 10 and that was a massive pain, due to both outdated nvidia-drivers, i had to recompile ffmpeg with the right flags and that would break after every update, the easiest way was to get an OBS flatpak that came prebuilt with it all IIRC I guess my problems with that were mainly because i used debian stable at that time, it’s probably not as much of a pain now that i’m on sid.
I don’t know anything about Nix, i heard a lot of good about it and how it’s “all config files” or something but the prospect of learning a whole new world scares me, but i trust your judgment on that. I’ll stick to what i know on my boring ass debian sid :D
For many admittedly smaller apps, it’s always a bit of a pain to have to install it manually because the dev simply gave up trying to package it for “the big 3” and distro maintainers can’t care about all small programs, although the current system works well enough for most programs.
However i am not a developer, so i can’t speak firsthand about the difficulty of packaging and maintaining your app on different distros across years, and i’m not sure if the brunt of maintaining all these apps should fall onto distro maintainers.
About users and using distros, i can agree that it’s roughly the same either way with the only real difference most of the time being “do you use apt or pacman to install packages”
Couldn’t you just as well recompile your own kernel without these telemetry issues, with Gentoo for example ? The fact that you can do this and can’t at all with Windows is a pretty big factor to me.
Genuine question then; do the distros using these kernels disable these telemetry upon installing them, should you tick the “no telemetry pls” options during the installation process ?
okay i can totally see why you wouldn’t like linux as a whole becoming “one thing”, but what is your opinion on the growth of linux on the desktop? By far the biggest factor in my opinion that’s pushing people away (consumers as well as devs) is having to deal with so many different distros, packaging apps with different libraries on so many different systems. Having standards that aim to reduce that load can only be beneficial for the masses to adopt an objectively better operating system, even if not perfect, wouldn’t it ? i.e. the rise of appimages and flatpaks as a means to curb that issue is to me a good thing, even if not “the most optimal way of doing things”
what kind of telemetry is pushed into the linux kernel, exactly?
You’re right, that was just the only example that came to my mind when thinking about the one time that a flatpak was more convenient to me than the alternative.